The ruins of the Vault were still, scorched into the earth like the memory of a fire.
Kael stood at its edge, the spiral still faintly glowing on his palm. Wind stirred the dust in careful spirals—too deliberate for coincidence, too quiet for comfort. Behind him, Elira crouched beside a fallen stone column, tracing her fingers over fractured sigils. Tovan kept his distance, rifle at the ready, gaze fixed on the horizon.
None of them spoke for a long while.
The Vault had collapsed, but the world hadn't ended.
And yet…
It wasn't the same.
The surrounding terrain looked familiar, but wrong.
The tree line stood farther back than it should have. The grass had a reddish hue in the morning light. The wind smelled of copper and ash.
"Where are we?" Tovan finally muttered. "This isn't where we entered."
"It's close," Elira said. She ran her hand over a root bulging through the stone. "But not exact. Time's bent. The sky's off, too. Those stars weren't aligned like that when we went in."
Kael said nothing. His heart beat slowly—each pulse more like a ripple than a rhythm. The Echoheart was gone, but something remained in its place. A presence. A watching.
Or was it listening?
As they moved through the nearby forest, even the wildlife shifted away from Kael. A pair of birds burst from the trees as he passed. A fox startled mid-step and fled.
Elira frowned. "They're avoiding you."
Kael nodded. "I know."
She hesitated. "Do you feel... different?"
"Yes."
"How?"
He glanced down at his hand. The spiral flickered, then dimmed.
"I don't know yet."
They reached the edge of a small outpost by dusk—a place they had passed through on the way to the Vault.
But no one recognized them.
The guards eyed them like strangers. The outpost's name on the gate was spelled differently—one letter off, like someone had rewritten the town and hadn't double-checked the details.
Maps in the small cartographer's lodge showed a river that now curved the opposite way.
Elira touched a wall. "These are recent. This isn't an error."
Tovan looked at Kael. "You really broke something."
Kael didn't argue. He couldn't.
That night, they camped beyond the town under the strange sky. Stars pulsed slower. The moon seemed farther away.
Kael couldn't sleep.
He sat upright, fingers brushing the spiral on his hand.
Then he heard it.
A voice—not the Vault's. Not memory. Something new.
It spoke in spiral-tongue, a language he had never learned but now instinctively understood:
"The seal was never the end. Only a breath."
The air thickened in his lungs, and for a moment, he could taste stone and fire—like breathing in the bones of something ancient.
Kael opened his eyes wide.
The spiral on his palm flared briefly.
And the wind—dead still moments before—began to stir.
It wasn't moving with him.
It was moving toward him.